Over the past few thousand years man has been mining on land for precious metals like gold, silver, copper, and so on but now new developments in underwater mining has opened up a whole new way to dig for these materials. The excessive mining on land for metals that people find desirable or useful has made it harder and harder to find easily accessible deposits of these valuable items. But now a company called Nautilus Minerals is using giant machines to tap into the rich reserves of copper, gold and other metals deep with in the ocean (1600 meters). The are finding mines with grades of over 8%, a massive improvement to the mine son land which average around .57%, these deposits deep within the pacific ocean rival those found before the bronze age on land.The CEO of Nautilus Minerals say that the technology to mine deep on the oceans surface is there it just needs to be used. The machines they use to mine these metals weighs 760 tons and will break up and scoop up the valuable minerals on the sea floor. The company hopes to start their mining of the coast of Papua New Guinea, and a similar mine on land would cost 6 times what it will under water. There are some environment al concerns about the project but deep sea mining seems to be a viable method for the future.
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